Here at Google, we’re serving more than a hundred APIs to ensure that developers
have the resources to build amazing experiences with them. We provide a reliable
infrastructure and make it as simple as possible so developers can focus on
building the future. With this in mind, we’re introducing a few improvements for
the API experience: more flexible keys, a streamlined 'getting-started'
experience, and easy monitoring.

Faster, more flexible key generation

Keys are a standard way for APIs to identify callers, and one of the very first
steps in interacting with a Google API. Tens of thousands of keys are created
every day for Google APIs, so we’re making this step simpler -- reducing the old
multi-step process with a single click:

You no longer need to choose your platform and various other restrictions at the
time of creation, but we still encourage scope management
as a best practice:

Streamlined getting started flow

We realize that many developers want to get straight to creation and don’t
necessarily want to step into the console. We’ve just introduced an in-flow
credential set up procedure directly embedded within the developer
documentation:

Click the 'Get a Key' button, choose or create a project, and then let us take
care of enabling the API and creating a key.

We are currently rolling this out for the Google Maps APIs and over the next few
months we'll bring it to the rest of our documentation.

API Dashboard

We’re not just making it easier to get started, we’re simplifying the
on-going usage experience, too. For developers who use one or more APIs
frequently, we've built the new API Dashboard to
easily view usage and quotas.

If you’ve enabled any APIs, the dashboard is front and center in the API
Console. There you can view all the APIs you’re using along with usage, error
and latency data:

Clicking on an API will jump to a detailed report, where you’ll see the traffic
sliced by methods, credentials, versions and response code (available on select
APIs):

We hope these new features make your API usage easier, and we can't wait to see
what you’re going to build next!